“So T.J. tell me how it feels to win a third national championship…”

Congratulations to Appalachian State on winning their third national championship last night. The defense really played great coming up with some critical third down stops. Delaware seemed so focus on defending against the Edwards rush, they seemed to have forgotten about Kevin Richardson, who had a stellar game. Let’s hope Dexter Jackson runs track again this year.

You had to be watching the broadcast with about 4 minutes left in the game to understand the quote in this post’s title. Additionally, if you didn’t see the broadcast, you missed out on seeing the apparent “oldest pimp of all time”.

Congratulations to ASU!

Three-peat coming on

Appalachian has a chance to three-peat as I-AA national champions next Friday after last night’s victory. I’m glad to see that Yosef got some national face time on ESPN2, and the commentators even mentioned ASU’s legendary track coach when talking about Dexter Jackson’s track accomplishments.

There were some good shots of Boone and the surrounding area on tv, including the Daniel Boone statue and Howard’s Knob. It really is a great stadium and setting for football. It should be quite nice once the renovations are complete.

Yosef

We took a trip up to Boone for Appalachian’s homecoming yesterday. It was a great day with good weather. The football game, which resulted in a resounding victory for ASU was a little boring, evidenced by the mass exodus from the stadium at halftime. It was great to visit the old stomping grounds though.

I think ASU has a great mascot, Yosef. The story goes that many years ago, the ASU yearbook put a picture of a mountain man among the student headshots with the intention of calling him “Yourself”. However, it was misspelled as Yosef, and the legend began. I’m not sure how you misspell Yourself as Yosef, maybe the local moonshine had something to do with it. You just can’t beat a flannel wearing, rifle toting, moonshiner mountain man for a mascot though. They need to bring back the corn cob pipe however.

Go Red Sox

Well, it’s finally playoff time. The Sox making the playoffs was never in serious jeopardy, although it was nice to get the Divsion championship as well. This has been the first year that I have really followed the team the entire season. Usually, I am really big into baseball at the beginning of the season, cool off some in the summer, then pick it back up in August and September. I try not to be a band wagon fan, but hey, sometimes I fall victim to it.

I think it helped some this year that I was able to see them play 3 times, once in Fenway (my first time ever), and twice in Baltimore at Camden Yards. They were 3-0 for those games. The Sox also had a lot of national TV coverage this year. I am also a fairly recent susbscriber to XM, so I could always listen to any game I wanted.

For the long stretches where there wasn’t any coverage, I tried out http://mlb.tv . Overall, not a bad service for the price. The premium subscription which streams at 700 KB/s has decent picture quality for around $10-15 a month.  It’s not as good a quality as regular TV though. The basic service is only at 400 KB/s  and I didn’t think it was all that watchable.  I used an s-video cable and the tv-out port on my laptop to display it on my TV. Oh, and one more thing it’s a Windows Media stream, and I never could get it to work under Linux, so I had to reboot to Windows when I wanted to use it.

Next year, I think I will investigate a satellite TV package that carries NESN, so I can get all the Red Sox coverage I could ever want. I think Dish Network has a package that carries NESN.

On a side note, I feel bad for Orioles fans who can’t get any coverage in this area due to the MLB blackout rules. It seems foolish, I don’t think many Orioles fans are going to drive up to Baltimore on the spur of a moment just b/c they can’t watch the game on TV. It seems like you would either want to take that 5 hour trip or not, I don’t see how the game not being on TV would influence you  to go.

I will have to post some pictures of Fenway and Camden Yards in a later post.

Better than puke green.

Your Brain is Yellow

Of all the brain types, yours is the most intellectual. You crave mental stimulation, and your thoughts tend to very complex. Your thoughts tend to be innovative and cutting edge, though many people don’t understand them. You tend to spend a lot of time thinking about science, architecture, and communication.

What Color Is Your Brain?

July 4th Cookout

Celebrated the 4th with a nice cookout. Beer and Brats (and corn too).

Python script for setting id3 tag

Ever since I got on last.fm (as swiftsoles) I’ve been listening to a lot more of my digital music. I’ve never really cared too much about id3 tags before, and, as I’ve used various ripping programs over the years, not all of my mp3’s have id3 tags set.

Seeing as how my music player of choice (Rhythmbox) and last.fm both make extensive use of id3 tags, I needed a way to set the id3 tags quickly on a bunch of my songs. Also, a lot of my mp3’s are named in the artist-title.mp3 format. So, I wrote a quick script to set artist and title information based on the filename, where it makes sense.

WordPress doesn’t seem to let me upload python files, so I’ve just pasted the file here. Also of note, kid3 seems to be the best graphical tool for setting tags.

import os
from optparse import OptionParser, Option

# from python-id3
from ID3 import *

music_dir = '/usr/music'
touched_files = []

def process_mp3(root, mp3_file):

    filename = os.path.join(root, mp3_file)

    try:
        id3tag = ID3(filename)

        if id3tag.has_tag == 0:
            print mp3_file, ‘has no tag.’

            # Only try to tag files with a ‘-’
            if mp3_file.find(’-') == -1:
                print ‘  ‘ + “Can’t tag file.”
                return

            split_name = mp3_file.split(’-')
            split_name[1] = split_name[1].split(’.')
            artist = split_name[0]
            title = split_name[1][0]

            # This is kind of hackish, but if the artist value
            # casts successfully as an int, fail.
            # This throws out a bunch of filenames like:
            # 01-song_title.mp3, that would end up incorrect.
            try:
                int(artist)
                print ‘  ‘ + “Can’t tag file.”
                return
            except ValueError, e:
                pass

            print ‘  ‘ + ‘Artist: %s Title: %s’
                  % (split_name[0], split_name[1][0])

            id3tag['ARTIST'] = artist
            id3tag['TITLE'] = title
            id3tag.write()

            touched_files.append(filename)

    except InvalidTagError, e:
        print “Invalid ID3 tag: “, str(e)

if os.path.isdir(music_dir):
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(music_dir):
        for filename in files:
            if root.find(’.') >= 0 or filename[0:1] == ‘.’ or
               not filename.endswith(’.mp3′):
                continue
            else:
                process_mp3(root,filename)

# Output all files we modified at the end, so that we can save it.
for file in touched_files:
    print file

New computer hardware.

I finally sprung for a LCD monitor…it’s a 22″ wide screen. I couldn’t get it to run at it’s native resolution of 1680×1050 with my old video card, so I had to upgrade that as well, a Radeon X1550. I decided to use the ATI proprietary drivers on Linux. Here’s how the install process went:

1. Enable livna repo

2. # yum install kmod-fglrx livna-config-display

3. # livna-config-display, click Apply.

4. Restart X.

5. Enjoy snappy graphics.

Here’s how installing the ATI drivers under Windows XP went:

1. Download drivers from ATI.

2. Try to install drivers…Fail. .net 2.0 required.

3. Download .net 2.0 from Microsoft.

4. Install .net 2.0…Fail. Windows MSI 3.0 required.

5. Download MSI 3.0 from Microsoft…Fail. Microsoft Genuine Advantage Checker key thingy needed.

6. Download Microsoft Genuine Advantage Checker key thingy from microsoft.

7. Run Microsoft Genuine Advantage Checker key, record key value produced.

8. Download MSI 3.0 from Microsoft…enter key when prompted.

9. Install MSI 3.0.

10. Reboot.

11. Install .net 2.0

12. Reboot.

13. Install ATI Drivers.

14. Reboot.

15. Reboot (again).

16. Enjoy snappy graphics.

Firstpost.

This is my blog.